Many students struggle with reading fluency. Schools often teach that fluency is the speed with which you read. Children are often timed while they read, and sometimes parents are even encouraged to time their children as they read at home. Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2007) report from their research that timing children can be harmful. Reading fluency has absolutely nothing to do with how fast you can read (Shaywitz, 2003). Reading fluency is instead how smoothly the child reads, how accurately, and whether the child understands and can comprehend the material (Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001). Shaywitz (2003) explains that repetition, rereading the same oral passage over and over is the best way to teach reading fluency. Fluency training should start the minute children begin learning to read.

Unfortunately, most children do not want to sit and read the same story over and over. To fill this need, we incorporate puppet plays into our program design. Children read and practice reading a puppet skit to present during their make-believe TV show, and they will eagerly reread the same skit several times to practice and be ready for the show. So, our program includes puppetry as a fun way to help children practice fluency, grammatical sentence structure, reading with emphasis and expression, and conveying ideas to an audience. For an audience to be able to understand what they were saying, the children often had to speak more slowly rather than seeing how fast they could read. Puppet plays provide an excellent way for children to practice fluency and also brought parents and family in at the end of the session to witness the children’s weekly improvement and accomplishments.

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Elaine Clanton Harpine, Ph.D.

Elaine is a program designer with many years of experience helping at-risk children learn to read. She earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology (Counseling) from the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.